Don’t toss that turkey! What to do with holiday leftovers

I love leftovers! I love reheating them in their original incarnation. I love reconfiguring them into new dishes. I also love packing them up to be frozen and enjoyed a few months down the road. Leftovers make life easy and delicious. So, imagine my shock when I heard the following statistic last weekend on Northwest Cable News:

Americans will throw away nearly $300 million of Thanksgiving turkey!

“Nationwide, consumers will purchase around 736 million pounds of turkey this Thanksgiving, of which about 581 million pounds will be actual meat. The USDA reports that 35 percent of perfectly good turkey meat in the U.S. does not get eaten after it is purchased by consumers (and that’s not including bones). This compares with only 15 percent for chicken. Why the disparity? ‘Possibly because turkey is more often eaten during holidays when consumers may tend to discard relatively more uneaten food than on other days,’ the USDA writes.”